Tortured. At his Special Needs school. By good people like us.
As I recently wrote to a commenter on another post, Ethics Alarms is not intended to catalogue every prominent example of unethical conduct, and not just because attempting to do so would require a fleet of bloggers. If it is discussed here, an incident usually requires some kind of ethical analysis to determine whether it is ethical or not, or has larger cultural or societal significance. That the incident at the center of this post was unethical (as well as illegal), there can be no doubt, and that, ironically, is why it is worthy of special attention. The conduct is self-evidently horrific and beyond justification, and yet it occurred anyway, in a community, state and nation where virtually every sentient citizen over the age of nine would say that it could never happen—not here, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The fact that it did happen is both a revelation and a warning.
Film footage under seal since 2002 was finally shown in a Massachusetts courtroom this week. The film shows how the staff of a school for special needs students in Canton, Mass., the Judge Rotenberg Center, strapped a disabled 18-year-old student named Andre McCollins to a table and proceeded to torture him, administering 31 jolts of electricity to the screaming boy over a seven hour period. Lawyers defending the school in a lawsuit have claimed that the atrocity was “treatment,” but other evidence indicates that it was punishment—for McCollins’ defiance of a teacher’s demands that he remove his jacket in class.
There are many factors that lead to conduct like this, which is not engaged in only by depraved individuals or people who as children pulled the wings off of flies. All that is needed is the extinguishing of a group’s ethics alarms, from a combination of power over others; a culture that is weak in its reinforcement of ethical values; an obsession with control; the absence of a rebel, organizational conscience or champion, and most of all an ethics corrupter, a leader or influential group member whose personality, power, popularity and authority effectively smothers the will and principles of those who work with him. In an isolated environment, such as a private school, such factors may not be defeated by the nation’s culture as a whole, especially when that culture itself is not as ethically grounded as it should be. The rights of juveniles and students are not universally accorded the respect they deserve in the U.S. The cultural messages regarding torture and physical abuse are not unequivocal here; this is why the nation’s acceptance of torture as a tool against terrorism was a catastrophic blunder with consequneces that extend far beyond the War on Terror. Add to this the lessons learned in Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, an unethical piece of social science research that nonetheless generated a crucial lesson. Good people can do terrible, unethical things under the right combination of circumstances.
One of those circumstances is complacency, bolstered by one of the most dangerous of the rationalizations, self-validating virtue. Good and essentially ethical people who believe that they live and work with people with similar values are not expecting evil to be close at hand, or to be pulled into doing the unthinkable. Their confidence in their own instincts dulls their ethical alarms, as when they find themselves engaged in wrongful acts, the rationalizations take over.
I’m going to post the Ethics Alarms updated list of rationalizations today, but the primary lesson for all of us to take away from the shocking video from Canton (you can watch it, if you dare, here) is to beware of complacency. We are not beyond corruption, and we can all do terrible things, unless we work hard to keep our ethics alarms in working order.
Ethics Alarms 
Incredible. Are children safe ANYWHERE anymore in this country? And why do so many of these stories come out of Massachusetts public schools?
Thank you for re-posting this. Some of us have been aware of this situation for many years, but have received no traction when we try to make others aware of it.
Even now, it’s not exactly front-page news,and I think it should be.
I understand how people could do this, they are evil. I used to wonder how everyone else could stand by, let this happen, and not say anything about it. I don’t anymore. I have found that most people are able to convince themselves that it didn’t happen. It doesn’t even register in their brains.
I have a few examples (not even close to that, thank God). For several years, we were told we couldn’t have raises at work because enrollment was falling and health insurance was going up dramatically. In one meeting, the finance head stood in front of the displayed enrollment numbers and told us that, yet again, they were down. Unfortunately, the slide showed that enrollment was actually UP. Later, this resulted in a rather bitter argument as 90% of the faculty insisted that enrollment was down. A later meeting revealed that out health insurance costs had not gone up for 5 years. Many faculty insisted that the the numbers must be wrong, because we were denied raises because the costs had been increasing so rapidly. This went on for 30 minutes, but many of the people in the room were not able to reconcile the difference and refused to believe the numbers, even though they were from the official budget. They insisted after the meeting that the data showed the costs were going up! Human behavior is scary.
But not entirely unpredictable.
Ancient jape: “Figures can’t lie, but liars can figure.”
Or how about Mark Twain’s three classes of lies: “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”
No, it does not prove that “[g]ood people can do terrible, unethical things under the right combination of circumstances”. It proves that good people do not exist.
Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”
Romans 8:7-8: “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
I’m concerned by your zealotry, Michael. If no good people exist, then why is there an impetus to do good things? Out of fear of a fictional hell-fire? I think not.
“Add to this the lessons learned in Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, an unethical piece of social science research that nonetheless generated a crucial lesson. Good people can do terrible, unethical things under the right combination of circumstances.”
I disagree. The Standford Prison Experiment only revealed what upper and middle class boys, lacking any true disciplinary training in life are:
1) Willing to do to their fellow man when given virtual omnipotence
2) Willing to submit to when placed in abject impotence
3) Quickly to break when placed in abusive situations – they could be said to be the first generation snowflakes.
Zimbardo could’ve saved time and money and just visited a variety of military schools where boys are often unleashed at a young age on other boys.
The experiment was (and still is) absolute BUNK for revealing anything we didn’t already know: Power in the hands of young, undisciplined people WILL BE ABUSED FOR THEIR PLEASURE.
But we knew this. History is replete with youthful tyrants to tell us this.
“Good people can do terrible, unethical things under the right combination of circumstances.”
Do Good people do this? Or is it that society has created a strict regime that holds bad people in check well enough that they can pass as good?
It didn’t directly prove this, of course. The fiasco led Zimbardo to examine how environment, peer pressure and culture coopts ethical values. His book “The Lucifer Effect” was the result, in which he examines other case studies, like the Nixon White House and Enron.
Ot does,prove that humanity is naturally evil, and ethical behavior is solely the result of the fear of adverse consequences.
This is best stated by what Star Wars mythology calls the Tarkin Doctrine.
“[R]ule through fear of force, rather than through force itself”
Fear is the source of ethical behavior.
Fear is the source of civilized behavior.
Morality is enforced by fear. Ethics by definition is not.